Judge allows 2 surveillance lawsuits to stand

A federal judge refused Monday to dismiss lawsuits in San Francisco challenging President George W. Bush's secret program, recently acknowledged by President Obama's administration, of seizing phone records and intercepting e-mails sent by millions of Americans.

The suits, filed in 2007 and 2008, claimed that Bush, in the name of combatting terrorism, illegally authorized a program of "dragnet surveillance" that indiscriminately collected records of domestic phone calls and monitored Internet messages, with the help of telecommunications companies.

After recent disclosures by computer analyst Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contract employee, President Obama has acknowledged the existence of similar programs, authorized by a secret court. Obama seeks Snowden's extradition on espionage charges and says the NSA inspects individual records only if it has evidence of terrorist connections.

The Obama administration won a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in February that dismissed a suit against a Bush wiretapping program, and sought dismissal of the San Francisco suits, arguing that they would inevitably threaten national security.

But U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White said the 1978 federal law that created the secret court to review foreign intelligence cases also authorized individuals to sue over secret surveillance, and allowed judges like him to review confidential records in private.

"The purpose of this provision is to permit courts to determine whether any particular surveillance was lawfully authorized and executed," said White, a Bush appointee.

He said he may ultimately decide that the suit would pose an undue risk to government secrets, but has not reached that conclusion yet. White left the door open to potential damage claims, and also asked both sides to discuss the impact of the Obama administration's recent disclosures and its stated plans to declassify some surveillance records.